Peggy Potter and Lori Klein, founders of the Crafts Collective and Gallery in Waitsfield. Seen on Friday, March 2, 2012. / GLENN RUSSELL, Free Press

Fabric artist Judy Dobbs at home in Waitsfield on Thursday March 15, 2012. She is holding one of her fabric pieces she calls a windowscape. Behind her is an auto-biographical tapestry. / GLENN RUSSELL, Free Press

A sampling of arts events and organizations in the Mad River Valley:

The Commons Group: Theater and musical theater productions and camps held at the Skinner Barn in Waitsfield. Information: www.theskinnerbarn.com

Green Mountain Opera Festival: Presenting professional opera in the summer at central Vermont venues, including the Round Barn in Waitsfield and the Gatehouse at Sugarbush resort. Information: www.greenmountainoperafestival.com

Madsonian Museum of Industrial Design: Founded by architect David Sellers, the museum in Waitsfield showcases objects of superior design, including furniture, toys and household objects; a fundraiser for the upcoming exhibit, “Walter Dorwin Teague: His Life, Work and Influence,” will be held 4 to 8 p.m. next Saturday. Information: www.madsonian.org

Phantom Theater: At a Warren barn, a performing arts company that features original work and has a kids camp. Information: www.phantomtheater.info

The Valley Players: Presenting community theater in the valley for more than 30 years; performing “Cabin Fever Follies” next weekend. Information: www.valleyplayers.com

Vermont Festival of the Arts: Annual August festival celebrating the arts, with more than 125 arts-related events and activities. Information: www.vermontartfest.com

Related Links

WAITSFIELD — Peggy Sparks was a college kid when she bummed a ride from another student to visit a boy in the Mad River Valley. “Sparky was my ride,” she said. “That was it. Bingo!” Sparky is Sparky Potter, her husband. Peggy Sparks became Peggy Potter in 1974, when she and Sparky got married. (Yup! Sparks and Sparky: art in the valley.)

The Potters are artists who live in Fayston in a house they designed and built before they got married, a home that was informed by “The Hobbit.” Making art started “oozing” out of Sparky Potter, and he was compelled to keep going, he said.

The Potters have lived in the Mad River Valley for more than 40 years, moving there out of college and winging it. They went on to start creative businesses, raise three children and build a constantly “morphing” house and collection of shop buildings.

“There was something magical about this place,” Peggy Potter, 61, said. “You came and stayed.”

The valley, with its expansive landscape and roving resort crowds, struck the couple as a place where you could build an interesting life and make it stick.

“Half of the neighbors are artists; that helps a lot,” Sparky Potter said. “There was a critical mass beginning already. People of all types are attracted to resort towns. Each one of us found motivation to stay here. There were builders and architects and craftsmen of all sorts. People like to be around other people who have similar motivations.”

Sparky Potter, a college history major, set to work making picture frames out of outhouse seats. He stooped lower than that, perhaps: customizing wooden toilet seats with the phrase “That’s all Folks” and painting a waving Elmer Fudd as the design centerpiece.

“Peg was kicking me out of the house that summer (the early 1970s) to take this stuff to crafts shows,” Sparky Potter, 63, said. At the fairs, he would disappear to play Frisbee with friends, leaving Peggy Potter to sell the stuff.

“I didn’t make it,” she said. “My feelings weren’t hurt if people didn’t buy it. I could talk it up.”

The signs, with wood-burned and hand-painted legends, were a hit. Sparky Potter was asked to make more.

‘Unique and cocky’ people

The Potters had found their way to a place architect David Sellers calls the “conscience of Vermont.” Sellers is a Warren-based architect and creative force behind Prickly Mountain, a collection of 1960s homes that are pioneering works in the design-build movement.

“Everyone in the valley is self-employed,” Sellers said. “Because all these people are doing creative things, it attracts other people. The arts are coalescing in various places: the individual artists are unique and cocky, and they should be.”

Sparky Potter and his ski-bum friends coalesced at the Bridge House, a renowned structure that was on Prickly Mountain (it has since burned). They rented it for the ski season and spent long weekends there.

Long weekends morphed into summertime, with wooden signs (“Have A Good Day”) and crafts fairs.

From these beginnings, Sparky Potter’s business, Sparky Potter Design Group/Wood and Wood Sign Systems, took form 40 years ago. He made signs for Sugarbush resort businesses and the Lake Placid Olympics. A 1976 Potter sign hangs on the front of the Ice House restaurant in Burlington. It’s a winter skating scene, its lines burned and painted on local pine, worn by the weather and busting with life. (If you haven’t viewed it up close, it’s well worth a walk to the Burlington waterfront or a drive from the Mad River Valley.)

“That showed me that you can actually do art in public,” he said. “I spent the next 25 years painting myself in the public world. I became addicted to public spaces.”

There were moments of private art, too: If the kids were watching TV, Sparky Potter would pause the image, trace it on a piece of paper, transfer the drawing to a piece of wood, and cut it with his jigsaw. Then the kids would paint it.

When the Potters needed wood to heat their house, they drove to the Granville bowl mill to pick up discarded, shelled logs on the side of the road. After a time, a mill person came out and said, “You’ve gotten a lot of wood, take a look at the bowls,” Peggy Potter recalled.

They bought some bowls and Sparky Potter painted them. “I found anything practical and painted art on it,” he said. Peggy Potter took a turn painting the bowls to give to friends for Christmas.

She hit upon a hit product she turned into a business, Peggy Potter Bowls. For more than two decades she made hand-painted wooden bowls and utensils. The pieces are characterized by their strong, vibrant colors and lucid designs.

Peggy Potter sold her bowls at the farmers market and shops, building a business that came to occupy a 1,200-square-foot studio and produce about 300 bowls a month, she said. (Not long ago she sold her business to Vermonter Lea Tyler, who moved it to Colorado.)

The bowls are available at the Artisans’ Gallery in Waitsfield, a gallery she founded with other craftswomen — all onetime exhibitors at the farmers market looking to expand their market. The Artisans’ Gallery, in its 17th year, is on Bridge Street, a survivor of the recession and the flood. Two of the original owners — Potter and jewelry-maker Lori Klein — are among the artists who cooperatively own and run the gallery.

Opening with 37 artists, the gallery now exhibits the work of about 180 juried artisans, almost exclusively Vermonters.

“We’re in Vermont,” Klein said. “And Vermont has that cache about the arts and crafts.”

Klein, who lives in Warren, makes jewelry and is a buyer for the Warren Store. She moved to the valley in 1980, but first came as a kid to ski at Sugarbush.

“A person can be an artist anywhere, and I think Vermont is a very aesthetically inspiring state,” Klein said. “You can do your art wherever you are.”

Artists and hippies arrived, seeking a certain lifestyle, she said. People kept their hands busy by day, and hung out together at night.

“It was like the best movie you’ve ever seen,” Peggy Potter said. “Except you were living it.”

Artistic matriarch in the MRV

Peggy Potter and Klein look to an older artist in the neighborhood — Judy Dodds — as a kind of role model for being an artist.

Dodds, 84, calls herself an artist and a hippie. She is a native of New Orleans who came to the Mad River Valley with her first husband, painter Jean Seidenberg, in the mid-1960s to escape the summer heat of the city.

In a rented house on Lincoln Gap Road, Seidenberg worked on his paintings and sculptures. Dodds, a fiber artist, made weavings.

Back home in New Orleans, Dodds worked as a museum curator. When her marriage ended, she packed up her two children and moved to Cambridge, Mass., where she got a job as a curator at the Boston Children’s Museum.

But Vermont beckoned — Dodds thought open space would be preferable for her children — and in 1970 she bought an 1857 house in Waitsfield, just past the bend in the road. She lives there with her husband of 39 years, graphic designer Jim Dodds.

The beauty of the natural surroundings appealed to her artist’s eye, Dodds said. The people in the Mad River Valley were welcoming and responsive to an artist’s work, she said.

“I thought it was so great that everybody knew everybody,” she said. “It was before the influx of retired corporate people.”

As a children’s museum curator, Dodds was trained to think in terms of what’s new, what’s happening, what will grab people’s attention.

She hit upon patchwork quilts, and started sewing them. People bought them. She made pieces she calls windowscapes — fabric still lifes often viewed through a window. She created fabric triptychs, renderings of landscapes that borrow from stained glass. New artistic endeavors were informed by past work — a watercolor becoming the basis of fiber art.

In the late 1970s, Dodds opened a gallery, Tulip Tree, where she sold her work and that of other Vermont artisans. She also carried touisty items she sensed would appeal to valley visitors.

“Even if you’re an artist, you have to have a good business head,” Dodds said. “Too many artists are off on some cloud somewhere, and that doesn’t work anymore.”

The first place Peggy Potter sold her painted bowls was at Dodds’ shop on consignment.

“When I handed over those first five bowls that I did, they were all individual, and what I thought were complete works of art that took me forever to do,” Peggy Potter said, “I felt like I was handing over my first-born child. I couldn’t bear to let go of those things.

“Judy said, ‘This is the way it is in art. You make it. You let it go. And you just keep making more.’”

Dodds still is making art, absorbed these days by rug hooking. She spent 12 years hooking a piece that tells the story of her life. It hangs in her sitting room and shows a road that leads from a townhouse in New Orleans, past New York and Boston, to a yellow house near a round barn in Vermont.

Dodds is interested in the sociology of rug hooking: the connections made by the women who work in hooking groups, what the pieces say about the artisan’s interests and life story.

She hangs her hooked rugs on the wall; after all that work, Dodds doesn’t want to walk on them. She thinks of rugs as paintings, the strips of cloth are her color palette.

“I’ll tell you something about life that’s very funny,” Dodds said. “You start off very rebellious, but you get more conservative as you get older.”

The Mad River Valley she discovered in the 1970s was “much more of a community open to ideas,” Dodds said. The hippies, she guesses, are at Goddard these days.

Shop rat to museum artist

Charlotte Potter was born 31 years ago this past Friday, the first of the Potters’ three kids. She also was the first child born to her parents’ hippie crowd, her mother said.

A baby?! Yikes! friends said of the early spring arrival.

If the valley gang were a little freaked out by a newborn, Charlotte came to feel a communal entrance: Her website bio reads: “Charlotte Potter is a conceptual artist and designer born in the spring of 1981 to a small town in Vermont.”

Soon, she was a “shop rat,” in the words of her father.

Her younger sister, Grace, hung out at the piano. Her brother, Lee, liked playing with his soccer ball. Charlotte lived in the fort her father made under his work table. She emerged from her hideout to help out.

By 5, she was cutting with a jigsaw. By 10 or 12, “she was very, very good at everything,” Sparky Potter said. Charlotte helped him paint signs, working on pieces her father thought would be memorable for her.

The other day, talking by telephone from a glass studio in a Virginia museum, Charlotte remembered: “I’m driving down Route 100 in my mind right now,” she said. “I think I probably helped paint the Mad River Glen sign.”

For many years, Charlotte Potter thought living in a Hobbit house, hanging out with artists and keeping fantasies alive “maybe too long” was the way all kids grew up.

It wasn’t until she brought friends home from college that she realized she came from a special place. Charlotte remembers an anniversary party for her parents at architect Jim Edgcomb’s barn — home of Phantom Theater.

“My friends thought they had showed up at some sort of hippie happening from the ’60s,” she said. “They were floored. That’s when it became clear to me that this was not normal; this was extremely special ...

“Who knows what forces were at work on my parents during the early ’70s. But it was very alive and active during our childhood, as well.”

Her sister, Grace Potter, is a rock musician who leads the band Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. The group’s fourth album, “The Lion The Beast The Beat,” will be released in June. Grace Potter returned home last fall to perform benefit concerts for flood recovery in the Mad River Valley. Her song “Mad Mad River” speaks to the meaning of the valley in her life.

“From a pretty early age we looked at each other and said, ‘OK, you got the musical stuff, I got the visual stuff,’” Charlotte said.

If a pronouncement were made in the Potter household, it was Sparky Potter’s saying he would never hire an art student to work at his sign/design company. Kind of pretentious, he told Charlotte.

But her parents didn’t bat an eye when Charlotte announced she was going to art school at Alfred University: a Potter who thought she’d be a potter. Art school was the obvious and only possibility, she said.

Less obvious, it turned out, was becoming a potter. When Charlotte saw the “hot shop,” or glass studio, it’s all she wanted to do.

“It was sort of like a magical process,” she said. “I wasn’t certain what they were doing, and I wanted to do more. I got into a class, and I never looked back. And I never stopped working with glass.”

After college, Charlotte worked as a kind of itinerant glass-blower, traveling from studio to studio around the country to learn and practice her craft. “The thing about glass, it’s extremely humbling material,” she said. “I had to really kind of fight for it for five years: Can I do it? How can I do it?”

To learn more about glass art — with an emphasis on why to make it, as opposed to how — Charlotte decided to go to graduate school. She earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design’s glass department.

Last May, Charlotte Potter accepted a position at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., where she is manager of the glass shop. A major component of her work is educational — a perfect fit for an artist most interested in process, intrigued by glass in its molten and moving state.

As part of her work, she and her team blow glass — mostly creating pieces relevant to the museum collection — before an audience at a daily “hot lunch special.” The event has seating for 70 people. On weekends, an overflow museum crowd watches the artists at work — part visual art, part performance art, fully a physically act — on TV.

In her own work, Charlotte Potter is creating a museum piece, “Profile Pictures,” for an upcoming show at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, “Fusion (A New Century of Glass.)” Her piece involves hand-engraving glass cameos of her Facebook friends’ profile pictures: 856 of them. The cameos, which long ago were worn as adornments, will be connected by fine chains at the museum installation.

“I’ve realized what I’m doing is actually making Charlotte’s Web,” she said.

At home in Vermont, when Charlotte Potter tries to talk about her work to people in the valley, they say, “‘That’s nice. Where’s your jewelry?’” she said. “They wander off and look for a commodity.”

The Mad River Valley is a little behind the times when it comes to exhibiting contemporary art, she said.

“A place I find so dear, a place I want to spend the rest of my life, and to think — maybe nobody is ready for the kind of artwork I’m making,” Charlotte Potter said. “That was a bittersweet moment for me.”